Page 129 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

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What would be the conditions of their ethically sound reappropriation?
How can one eschew several pitfalls such as communal jingoism, sterile
preservation, political manipulation, imaginary empathy, arbitrary
reading, subjective fusion, epistemologically alien hermeneutical re-
ferences, and so on?
The first chapter, ‘The Donkey, a Mirror of Self-identification in
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Myths from the Vaar Community’ by Guy Poitevin, is a minute study of
three narratives which have been collected from a marginalized Indian
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community, the Vaars, traditionally earth-diggers, stone-breakers and
stone-cutters in central India and Maharashtra. The rationale behind
the method which mainly draws upon linguistic theories and practices
is vindicated with reference to the present function and status of the
narratives in the communities to which they belong.
The chapter starts by systematically displaying the ways and proce-
dures of a methodological experiment. It projects epistemological issues
which confront cultural studies in India and especially those scholars
who concern themselves with folk narrative traditions. Issues are raised
in reference to those avenues brilliantly traced out by Jean-Pierre
Vernant, in historical studies of ancient Greece, Emile Benveniste in
linguistics, Claude Levi-Strauss (1960) in anthropology and Paul Ricœur
(1983, 1990) in hermeneutics. The status of traditional narratives as
asset to communicative strategies to build up communities, yesterday
as well as today, and the relevance or otherwise of such a cultural heri-
tage in our present times depends upon hermeneutical stands, which
are spelt out in the first part. Culture as diachronic confrontation of
modern critique with past traditions rests upon a decision with respect
to such epistemological stands, unless such traditions be simply thrown
aside as anachronistic and merely kept in archives. Then the three oral
narratives are thoroughly processed following a method the categories
and procedures of which are first explicitly spelt out.
The second chapter, ‘Memory and Social Protest: The Myth of
Chuharmal in the Bhojpur Area’ by Badri Narayan, focuses on the
reappropriation for socio-political purposes of the popular myth of
Chuharmal owned as a ‘hero’ by the lower castes of central Bihar. The
chapter deals with those processes which tend to capture an ethnic
memory in order to develop altogether different symbolic systems of
social communication. Naturally, this capture is resisted by the heirs
of the living mythic memorial who make all attempts to save and